The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2014 33 days.” And I’d collect all these stories that would all be there for people to lis- ten to. But when I eventually started the oral history program, I discovered very quickly that a lot more was involved. First, you had to get everything transcribed. Nobody’s going to listen to people sit and talk. You’ve got to have a repository for them. Then you have to get it out and get it known. So I hustled and got somebody at The George Wash- ington University interested. They took me in with another colleague, Victor Wolf, and that’s where we started the oral history collection. Unfortunately, Victor was killed in a car accident shortly after we started. One problemwas that George Washington University had just one diplomatic historian, and his period was the Napoleonic era, which didn’t dovetail too well with the 20th-century focus of American oral histories. SD: Then you moved the collection to Georgetown University, right? SK: Yes, and it stayed there until 1988. Now we’re part of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, at the Foreign Service Institute. They came up with the idea of a whole list of things to do to help the Foreign Service Institute at the time it was getting ready to move to a new campus. When I started this thing, I had the idea that one of these days, there’s going to be a great library in the sky for material like this, where anyone could use it. I had no idea about the specifics, but the Internet was just starting to take off. In many ways, we’ve really been the beneficiaries of larger developments like that. SD : Still, you had a lot of foresight before the technology was even there—a vision. SK: Yes, there was a vision there. Early on, I had some concepts like offering country readers, which would extract from all the oral histories entries that deal with, say, Patagonia or whatever. And I put together about 20 of those. There was no money, so I typed the manuscripts myself and even bound them. SD: Of course, now the transcripts are online, and searchable, taking it to a new level. SK: Oh, yes. We’re now past the 2,000 mark. And since we started the intern program, we have been able to do more country readers and even subject readers. SD: Did you conduct most of the interviews yourself? How long do they take? SK: Many, but not most of them. Now though, I am doing most of them. In the early days, each oral history would last about an hour and a half. Now they are much longer. I started to put more emphasis on people’s early years. Not all of that information is being used now, but we have a signifi- cant body of information about, for example, growing up as an immigrant in the United States, about college pro- tests during Vietnam, things like that. I should also note that from the very beginning, I wanted each inter- view to cover social history and be as representative as possible of different demographics. We wanted to interview women, but they just weren’t there. Now they are. SD: Were there any interviews that didn’t work? SK: I remember one: the individual had had a very distin- guished career, but when I got there, I realized the poor man had severe dementia. At a certain point, I just turned the tape recorder off and kept chatting. We do have a problem, a serious one. This is when someone does an oral history interview with us and then does not edit the transcript and return it to us. We have two options. Option one is to turn it over to a volunteer Foreign Service person to clean it up. The other one is to wait until they die. That’s pretty much it. We’re not going to let go of it; it’s just a matter of timing. [Wry laughter, as Kennedy knows that Dorman is one of these slackers.] How is your health? SD: I’m holding on! It’s fascinating to me, the process and what happens in the interview, the way that you elicit all that personal information. In my interview, it felt like my whole life was laid out (First) Stu Kennedy, left, with the ADST team in 2007: Financial Officer Marilyn Bentley, Executive Director Les McBee, Publishing Director Margery B. Thompson and President Amb. Kenneth L. Brown. (Second) Stu Kennedy interviewing Amb. Nicholas Burns, a career FSO and former under secretary of State for political affairs (2005-2008). (Third) Foreign Service “brat” Kathleen Turner, an interviewee, with Kennedy. ADST/AFSA/Jeff Lau